There was silence for an interval and then the pleadings began more earnestly, more piteously. "O God, give me her! Give me love! Give me completeness! Give me that without which no man is strong, the undoubting love of an unwavering woman! Give me that and I can face anything—endure anything!" For a moment his hands, virile and outstretched, grasped convulsively the far edges of the Indian rug on which he had fallen, and thrust themselves through the stoutly woven fabric as if it had been wet paper. Scalding drops had begun to flow from his eyes like rivers. He seized the fabric of the rug in his teeth and bit it. He forced the thick folds against his eyes as if to dam the flooding tears. "It is too much! It is too much!" he moaned. "O God," he reproached, "you have left me; you have left me alone and far. I have stood, but I am tottering." He dropped into a sort of vernacular in his blind pleadings. "I can go, I can go the route, but I cannot go it alone. Give me her, O God, give me her!" His voice, half-delirious, died out in a final withering sob, as if the last atom of his strength had gone with this passionate, hoarse, uttermost plea of his soul. His great fingers stretching out again to the limit of his arm, knotted and unknotted themselves and then grew still. The shoulders, too, were motionless. The face was turned on one side; the profile of the ridged forehead and the thrust of nose and chin, so strongly carved, appeared against the grotesque pattern of the rug as features delicately chiseled. The eyes were open, tearless now and staring. They had expression, but it was the expression of the beaten man. The mouth was parted, and the firm lines were gone from it. It was the old, loose, flabby mouth that had once marked the weak spot in the character of the man. Again the man was weak. He lay so still that life itself seemed to have gone. The wandering afternoon breeze that stole in through one gable window and went romping out at the other played with the mass of hair upon his brow as indifferently as if it had been a tuft of grass. Even the man’s enemies must have pitied him had they seen him now. Searle, standing over him, would have felt a twinge of conscience. Elder Burbeck, before that spectacle, would at least have paused long enough to murmur, sincerely, with upturned eyes and a grave shake of the head, "God be merciful to him, a sinner." But neither Searle nor Burbeck, nor any other eye was there to see how he lay nor how long. Perhaps not even Tayna, crouching on the stairs outside, hearing his sobbings and venting tear for tear, could have computed the time.